


Livin' Sure Beats the Hell Out of Dyin'

by TWDObsessive



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Affection, First Kiss, Fluff, Friendship/Love, M/M, POV Daryl Dixon, POV First Person, Takes place after the tornado, learning to live
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 05:59:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8957314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TWDObsessive/pseuds/TWDObsessive
Summary: A quiet morning after the tornado in an AU where the group turned Aaron away.  Daryl wakes early with Judith and ponders about living and dying.  Rick joins them and tries to show Daryl what really living is all about.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I have had a shitty week! And when the going gets tough, the tough hide in fic. So here's one, compliments of my crappy job!
> 
> Unbeta'd cause it's just a little drabble.

It ain't easy to wake up every day. To get out of a bed, or a sleeping bag or just a spot on the grass and force ourselves to take each next step. Eat something if we have it. Boil water to drink from wherever we can find it. Hunt for more food so we can do it all over again the next day.

I'd started to wonder the point. We was all gonna die eventually and how much struggle and pain could we go through before it all ends? Answer’s easy though. Them damn kids. They don’t deserve this life. Deserve dollies at Christmas and Santa Claus and being on Rec league to play football or soccer. But not these kids. Not in this world. All they get is food and water...on a good day. And hopefully the sun going down with everyone still alive that was there when the sun first rose that morning. We had to live so that we could try to give them the chance to.

Judith’s strongest personality trait is her silence. It‘s like she was born into a world where she innately knew it was a survival technique to stay quiet. That ain't no way to be a kid. Ain't no way to live.

None of us is livin’ anyway. This ain't livin’. We’re surviving because we’re afraid to die. Afraid that if this earth ain't hell, then hell must be somethin’ unimaginably worse… Cause that's where we’re all goin’. If there even is such a thing. We all done things we ain’t proud of. Christ, even Carl. Kid ain’t even done growin’ yet and he’s had to fight and kill.

Most likely death is just gonna make us walkers anyway. Or give us the mercy of one through the head and then it's worms and maggots until their ain't nothin’ left. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

Judy’s quiet cries is the only thing that reminds me to live. I hear her in the barn we’d been stayin’ in after the tornado and after we sent that GQ model away. We didn't need no promise land. All we needed was each other. 

Rick was fast asleep in a way he don't often get so I took girly from his arms. He flinched, opened an eye, saw it was me and settled back down. Most everyone else was still sleeping after a few stressful days, but not me and girly. We was always the first ones up.

I changed her diaper and put together some formula and took her outside to feed her in the sunlight. She’s pale as a ghost. Don't get enough sun or fresh air. Don't get enough nothin’. I sat on a log, crossbow over my shoulder and she latched onto the nipple of her bottle and drank like the good girl she always is.

The plan was to move on in case GQ came back with his people to attack. He didn’t seem too much of a threat, hell gettin’ in a scuffle with us might wrinkle his perfect pants or muss up his clean, washed hair. I wasn’t too worried about it but Rick calls the shots. He ain’t never let none of us down before and I’ll always follow his lead without question. 

It was good to see the sun out after the tornado and the overcast days that followed. It would be a good day to move on.

“Where ya think, girly? Where you wanna go? Paris? Hawaii? Disneyland?” I joked as she drank and held tight onto one of my fingers like she might fall away if she loosened her grip.

I heard Rick comin’ up behind us. Didn’t even have to turn around. I know everyone’s walk. Rick’s is strong and confident with a softness to it like he didn’t mean no harm to whomever he was approaching. Maggie’s steps were determined like she knew exactly where she was going even if she didn’t. Eugene took small steps with a short nervous stride. I knew them all. 

“How about Graceland?” Rick asked with his scratchy morning voice. You get to know a lot about people when you spent so much time this close. I knew the sound of Rick’s voice in the morning. I could tell if Carol had a nightmare just by her expression when she wakes up. I knew who snored and who didn’t. I knew Sasha sometimes cried when she thought everyone else was asleep.

“Graceland?” I asked smilin’ up at him? “Never took you for an Elvis guy.”

He shrugged and smiled as he sat next to us. “I miss music. Even the godawful kind Carl was listening to before the world went to shit.

I briefly flashed to Beth and Maggie singin’ to us that first night in the Prison courtyard and I quickly stomped down the memory. Ain’t got no time for the dead. Gotta focus on the livin’. Can’t make it any other way. Judy was done her bottle and I put her over my shoulder to burp her while Rick looked off at the horizon most likely trying to pick a direction to start walking. 

“Where ya think?” I asked as girly started chewin’ on strands of my hair.

“North maybe? Try to find another kind of place like the prison we can call home.”

Didn’t really matter to me which way we went. I’s just gonna follow Rick and them kids. “I can go ahead a’ways and try to find some deer. We ain’t been eatin’ too well. Folks is getting weak. Sasha and Carl. Both of ‘em fightin’ it but I can tell,” I said.

Rick looked at me, that grown out greying beard of his making him look like both wild and soft all at the same time. “You’re good at this, Daryl.” he said with those sincere blue eyes that stood out even more with dull color of his beard.

“Good at what?” I asked as girly snuggled down in the crook of my arm for a post-breakfast nap. 

“Good at livin’.”

I snorted out a soft laugh. “Ain’t sure I ever really lived. Just know how to get by,” I said, always one to push off a compliment. Ain’t used to gettin’ ‘em and never know how to respond.

“You deserve to be able to know living better than you do, Daryl. You know I’d never have made it this far without you by my side.”

I shrugged and grunted which was Dixon for ‘I have no idea how to respond to that’.

“Can I show you a little about what living is like?” he asked. His voice had gone deeper and I could sense his nerves. I took my eyes of my sleeping little girl and met Rick’s again. I answered with another shrug and grunt.

He moved closer to me. There was a time when any approach like that would have had me running for the hills. Don’t usually like close contact. Don’t usually like emotions and feelings and shit and I just knew this was going to be one of those emotional lectures of Rick’s. 

But it wasn’t. Instead, he put a hand on my cheek and leaned in and pressed his lips to mine. I didn’t even startle at something so strange because as unexpected and bizarre as it should have been, it just wasn’t. It was comforting. It was nice. It was his warm soft lips and the brush of his beard against my face. It was closeness. It was love. It was… living.

When he finally pulled away I looked down at girly to make sure she didn’t have to see no rated-R stuff so young and luckily she was fast asleep.

“Livin’ sure beats the hell out of dyin’, don’t ya think?” he asked me.

I nodded. Maybe I ain’t even tried livin’ yet. Maybe it was time I should.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little short and sweet drabble to kill some time.


End file.
